From Jill Stein for President:
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein praised former Senator Russ Feingold today for speaking plainly when he says that, “The President is wrong to have embraced the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United and that’s what you’re doing when you start using and consorting with Super PACs.” [...]
Green Party Watch
The 2011 Texas Legislature slashed the state’s funding of public K-12 schools, colleges and universities. The real motivation for underfunding public education is to replace our low cost public system of education available to every citizen with a high cost private ‘for profit’ education system.
While for-profit colleges do indeed educate more low-income and minority students than other institutions, this is in large part because support for the traditional alternative, community college, has failed to keep pace with demand.
Though no one maintains a comprehensive list of state funding for community colleges, state and local support for community colleges on a per-student basis declined by 5 percent in 2009 from a decade earlier, according to Department of Education statistics compiled by the Delta Project, a nonprofit research group that studies higher education spending. The total subsidies provided to students by community colleges, including funding from public sources and other outside support, fell by 10 percent over the last decade, on a per-student basis.
The Obama administration has significantly boosted funding for Pell Grants, which are available to low-income students. Over the last three years of the program, the federal government has more than doubled spending on Pell grants, budgeting billion more this year than in the 2007-08 school year. For-profit colleges have captured an outsized share of this pool — roughly 25 percent — despite educating only 12 percent of college students nationwide, according to the most recent federal data.
Had the .5 billion that for-profit institutions received via Pell Grants during the 2009-2010 school year gone instead to fund community college systems nationwide, that money could have created capacity for an additional 629,000 community college students, The Huffington Post calculated, using available estimates for the average expenditure per student. That would represent a 20 percent increase in the number of full-time community college students currently enrolled nationwide.
At California’s community colleges — the nation’s largest system of higher education, serving a quarter of community college students nationwide — an estimated 200,000 students will be turned away from classes next school year, according to the state community college chancellor’s office, following state cutbacks of nearly 20 percent across the entire system. That amounts to more than 7 percent of the entire state’s community college student body, and that does not count those who gave up on plans to enroll due to the difficulties of securing classes.
After accounting for inflation, California is now spending the same amount on community colleges that it did six years ago, despite adding more than 175,000 students in that period, a nearly 20 percent increase. On a per-student basis, the state is spending less this year than it was 15 years ago.
The for-profit college programs that have been absorbing the resulting overflow of students are on average more than five times as expensive as their community college counterparts, according to a Senate report that examined such schools nationally. While only about one in five students at community colleges takes out loans to finance their tuition, four of five students at for-profit two- and four-year schools sign off on loans, according to Department of Education data.
Because of the high costs and high debt loads, students at for-profit colleges are responsible for about 45 percent of all student loan defaults.
In the eyes of public education advocates, for-profit colleges are the inevitable, opportunistic outgrowth of a society that simultaneously rewards those with greater education while it eliminates traditional support for public campuses.
“The economy is essentially telling people that you have to get some kind of post-secondary degree or credential,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “So the demand is growing very fast, and our ability to fund this function is crashing. It’s not just declining, it’s crashing. The public sector is basically getting out of the business, so the costs are shifting to the individual students.”
Read the full article @ Huffington Post
John Boehner, Incoming Speaker of the House
The GOP’s dramatic gains in Tuesday’s midterm election have positioned John Boehner as the incoming Speaker of the House in the 112th Congress. In his twenty years in Congress, Boehner has been one of the fiercest protectors of Corporate America, and his political and legislative history provide a striking road map for what to expect from his tenure as Speaker.
Following stints in local politics and service in the Ohio State House, John Boehner was elected to the United States Congress in 1990. In his second term in Congress, Boehner helped write the Contract with America and became a stalwart ally of Newt Gingrich, even his “protégé.” Boehner backed Gingrich’s partisan and confrontational style of leadership, and Gingrich elevated him to the position of GOP Conference Chairman. From there, Boehner became the go-to Member of Congress for corporate lobbyists and business interests.
As Conference Chairman, Boehner “met weekly with leading lobbyists to enlist their support and discuss strategy” throughout his four year tenure. During a vote to remove a subsidy to the tobacco industry, Boehner personally handed out checks from tobacco lobbyists and industry PACs to other congressmen on the House floor. At least one Republican colleague, Rep. Linda Smith, blasted Boehner’s actions, saying that “if it is not illegal, it should be.” Since his role in the Republican leadership was closely tied to Gingrich, when Gingrich resigned following the GOP’s 1998 election loss, Boehner was voted out of his leadership position.
After he was forced out of his role as Conference Chairman, Boehner embarked on a plan to regain support among his Republican colleagues. His leadership PAC, called the “Freedom Project,” took in millions of dollars from special-interest lobbyists, and he then used the money to contribute to his fellow Republican candidates. Top contributors included Sallie Mae, Merrill Lynch, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Cincinnati Financial Corp., which helped make Boehner’s leadership PAC one of the best-funded among his peers. The “major sources of financing” for the Freedom Project came from “for-profit colleges and trade schools, and private student lenders,” and as chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Boehner sponsored “legislation strongly supported by private student lenders to restrict the ability of the U.S. Department of Education to make government student loans less expensive by cutting fees.” Boehner told representatives from student loan companies that he has “tricks up my sleeve to protect you,” and he later helped pass a law to bar individuals from refinancing their student loans.
According to Boehner, “I have a good relationship to K Street and people who lobby us.”
Even Boehner’s landlord is a lobbyist, and the Washington Post writes that his landlord’s “clients — including restaurant chains and health insurance companies — hired him to lobby on issues at the heart of Boehner’s work, including minimum-wage increases, small-business tax breaks and tax-free savings accounts to help cover insurance costs.”
In addition to building relationships with corporate lobbyists, Boehner enhanced his standing with the Religious Right. In 2002 Boehner wrote a letter to the Ohio Board of Education urging them to teach intelligent design in public schools, using language derived from anti-evolution activist Phillip E. Johnson. Cyrus B. Richardson Jr., the school board vice president, called Boehner’s letter “misleading” because “it makes it sound like the law says you have to teach intelligent design, when that isn’t in the law.”
He has consistently stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Religious Right throughout his time in Congress. Boehner voted to ban same-sex couples from adopting children and to repeal domestic partnership laws, he opposed hate crimes laws and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and he supported Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. On issues regarding reproductive justice, Boehner voted against protecting reproductive health clinics and backed laws which would compel women to go through biased counseling before terminating their pregnancy. In his speech to the Family Research Council’s 2009 Values Voter Summit, Boehner emphasized his steadfast, 100% anti-choice record. After the 2010 election, Boehner’s chief of staff met with Randall Terry, the radical founder of Operation Rescue, who pressured Republicans in the House to criminalize abortion.
Following Tom DeLay’s resignation as Majority Leader in 2006 (after DeLay was indicted on conspiracy and money laundering charges for which he was recently convicted) John Boehner returned to the GOP leadership and was elected to replace DeLay. From the outset, Boehner pledged to support Republican plans to privatize Social Security, worked against a bipartisan immigration reform bill, and vigorously fought stronger ethics laws. Once elevated to Majority Leader, his leadership PAC received even more financial support from special interest groups. The New York Times found that “Mr. Boehner’s biggest donors include the political action committees of lobbying firms, drug and cigarette makers, banks, health insurers, oil companies and military contractors.” Boehner’s PAC also received ,000 from casino-owning American Indian tribes with ties to convicted felon Jack Abramoff.
Boehner only deepened his ties to special interest lobbyists and intensified his pro-corporate agenda after the 2006 elections, when Republicans lost their majority and he became Minority Leader. Like the Freedom Project, the “Boehner for Speaker” committee allowed lobbyists to buy significant access to the congressman. Lobbyists were allowed “VIP access” to Boehner and his top aides if they could raise 0,000 worth of contributions or more for the committee. But Boehner’s ties to lobbyists don’t end there: he routinely met with business leaders, particularly from the banking and tobacco industries, at his Thursday Group meetings, spent tens of thousands of dollars “to travel to golf destinations on a corporate-subsidized tab,” and gave business associations a larger platform through his America Speaking Out initiative. In September, the New York Times profiled his close ties with K Street:
He maintains especially tight ties with a circle of lobbyists and former aides representing some of the nation’s biggest businesses, including Goldman Sachs, Google, Citigroup, R. J. Reynolds, MillerCoors and UPS.
They have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns, provided him with rides on their corporate jets, socialized with him at luxury golf resorts and waterfront bashes and are now leading fund-raising efforts for his Boehner for Speaker campaign, which is soliciting checks of up to ,800 each, the maximum allowed.
Some of the lobbyists readily acknowledge routinely seeking his office’s help — calling the congressman and his aides as often as several times a week — to advance their agenda in Washington. And in many cases, Mr. Boehner has helped them out.
Special interest groups continue to pay handsomely to gain access to Boehner and his aides. This year Boehner raised well over million and Fredreka Schouten of USA Today writes the “industries giving the most to Boehner” include “insurance companies, drug manufacturers and Wall Street firms, all of which now face new regulations adopted by the Democratic-controlled Congress.” In all, the financial and insurance industries have been his top donors, contributing .8 million to his political committees.
Boehner’s connections to corporate lobbyists and trade associations greatly influenced his political work. He is big business’s chief advocate on the Hill, and his efforts include “combating fee increases for the oil industry, fighting a proposed cap on debit card fees, protecting tax breaks for hedge fund executives and opposing a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.” Reacting to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Boehner agreed with the US Chamber of Commerce that taxpayers should subsidize the cleanup, rather than forcing BP to pay for the entire bill. Boehner has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from oil companies, and fought attempts by Democrats to lift the liability cap in order to make BP pay for the entire cost of the cleanup.
Boehner vehemently opposes greater supervision of the financial industry and worked tirelessly against Wall Street reform, comparing new oversight and regulations to “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.” When speaking to an “enthusiastic crowd of bankers at the American Bankers Association government relations summit,” Boehner told them to fight regulatory reform and not “to let those little punk staffers take advantage of you.” Before the historic financial reform bill came up for a vote, Boehner “met with more than 100 lobbyists” to strategize their opposition, and after the legislation was signed into law, he immediately called for its repeal.
But while Boehner looks after his friends and campaign contributors on K Street and Wall Street, he voted against recent legislation to increase lending and tax relief for small businesses, voted ‘No’ on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, attempted to stop extending benefits to unemployed Americans, and vigorously opposed a proposal to bolster and ensure government funding for the medical treatment of 9/11 rescue workers. He also led the opposition to the DISCLOSE Act, which would have made corporations publicly disclose their political contributions and prevent foreign corporations from spending in US elections.
An unapologetic beneficiary of corporate money and an unwavering ally of K Street, John Boehner consistently supports the interests of big business over the public interest. Corporations and their lobbyists are largely responsible for financing his political operations, crafting his policy proposals, and lifting his political career and ambitions. Not only has John Boehner embraced Wall Street and K Street, but he also worked hard to shore up his support from the Religious Right and other conservative interest groups. As the next Speaker of the House, John Boehner will have even more power to advance the goals of Washington lobbyists and push his right-wing, pro-corporate agenda.
